Devotional from Dr. Long: Matt 2:13–18 – “God’s Word, Jesus, and Dreaming”
I’ve often wondered why God created us to “need” sleep. We are completely vulnerable; and we are able to have dreams. God allows us to process our lives via dreams and our sleeping space becomes a place where God can warn and lead, as it was for Joseph. Our passage today contrasts divine and evil human agencies. Matthew 2:13–18 shows how God speaks, both through Scripture and through an angel in a dream to Joseph, who receives two more dreams in 2:19–23.
The Book of Hebrews begins, “In many portions and in many ways God spoke to the fathers in the Prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us in His Son…” (1:1–2a). Jesus culminates God’s speaking to us; He is the Word. This speaking is seen in Jesus’s genealogy (Matt 1:1–17), conception (1:18–25), and early life (ch.2).
Due to the plotting fear of King Herod, infant Jesus’s life was in the balance, causing a flight and return from Egypt (2:13–23). In this way, even Jesus’s early life fulfilled the Exodus of God’s people who are called “My Son” in Hosea 11:1. Followers of Jesus received this identity as sons and daughters; God has always wanted to have us in His family (2 Cor 6:18). In contrast, King Herod’s hell-bent pursuit to kill his baby rival, Jesus, led him to slaughter infants and destroy families; yet even this fulfills Scripture (Matt 2:16–18; Jer 31:15; see Rev 12:1–6).
God also speaks through dreams. The Book of Job explains, “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, while they slumber on their beds, then he [God] opens their ears, and terrifies them with warnings, that he may turn them aside from their deeds, and keep them from pride” (33:15–17, NRSV; cf. Gen 20:3). Many instances of dreaming and interpreting dreams occur in Scripture—e.g., Joseph (Gen 37:5-11; chs.40-41) and Daniel (Dan 1:17; 2:1, 26–28; 4:5–9; 7:13–14; etc.). Indeed, the apostle Peter on Pentecost quoted Joel 2:28–32 as now fulfilled. Peter quoted the Prophet Joel, “your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams” (Acts 2:17).
Although dreams and visions have a place among God’s people, God warns that we need discernment. God explained that prophets or “dreamers of dreams” could actually mislead the people into idolatry (Deut 13:1–5). Indeed, Jude 8 describes certain dreamers that infiltrate the church to mislead people. God told Miriam and Aaron that, while He spoke to his prophets by visions and dreams at night (Num 12:6), this was not so with Moses with whom God speaks “mouth to mouth, even openly, and not in dark sayings, and he beholds the form of the Lord” (Num 12:7–8, NASB). In Jesus we have someone even superior to Moses since he is “the exact representation of God’s nature” (Heb 1:3). He is God and God’s Word incarnate for us.
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